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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

You don't want to get to the point of a court order. Expecting twitter to defend you when you're committing copyright infringement is ridiculous. They don't have to do it only when the platform is used for direct infringement, they remove the account before they can do that and before the legal problems.

This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.

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> This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.

Are they committing copyright infringement on Twitter?

They're an organization who's purpose is to commit copyright infringement. They don't have to be doing the infringement on twitter itself for twitter to reasonably suspend them. Again, they suspend them to prevent the platform being inevitably used for direct infringement or to be used as a guide on where/how to participate in the infringement.

Twitter may not be responsible for user content as per section 230 but it's also not a good idea as a company to step on the toes of intellectual property holders without good reason.

Does Twitter automatically ban everyone using the hashtag #CanHasPDF? That's how scientific papers were spread before SciHub; what Elbakyan did was to move the copyright infringement off Twitter and to a dedicated service.

Yes. The featured article notes that they were providing links on their Twitter account. Their quoted defense includes, to paraphrase, the account was /mostly/ discussing open access issues, it wasn’t /primarily/ for sharing pirated materials.

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